April 21st, 20174:00 PM

Seth Michelson will share his experience leading a poetry class/workshop with a group of incarcerated undocumented unaccompanied minors at a detention center and will also share some of the poems created at the workshop.

Seth Michelson is an Assistant Professor of Spanish at Washington and Lee University. His research interests include Latin American Poetry and Translation Theory. He is also a poet and his most recent collection of poems, Swimming Through Fire, was published earlier this year.

Diego Matadamas Gomora is a Ph.D. student at Tulane University. He is interested in the art and ritual life of the Aztecs. He earned his bachelor’s degree in archaeology at the National School of Anthropology and History in Mexico City.

The Aztecs are one of the most famous pre-Hispanic cultures in Mexico. They founded the city of Tenochtitlan in AD 1325 on a small island in the middle of a lake and became the most powerful empire in Mesoamerica. They left a large corpus of archaeological remains that show the development of their society. For their part, the European priests and conquerors who arrived in the city in AD 1519 were surprised by the beauty and complexity of the Aztec religion. For this reason they wrote numerous chronicles and with the natives produced valuable pictorial manuscripts.

This talk will explore this fascinating society to see the evolution of the Aztecs from their origins as hunter-gatherers until the creation of the great empire that dominated a vast territory. We will see that archaeology becomes the primary discipline to discover the traces left by the Aztecs and to prove that the power, political control, rituals, and richness were sometimes much more amazing than the Europeans described.

In 2018 the Ministry of Foreign Affairs of Mexico established the Mexican Cultural Institute in New Orleans. The primary objective of the Mexican Cultural Institute is to promote the image of Mexico by supporting cultural expressions in its broadest and fullest sense, including multidisciplinary forms like visual arts, music, performing arts, film, literature and gastronomy. The mission of the Cultural Institutes is to be protagonists of the cultural scene in their different host cities.

Stone Center for Latin American Studies to host 11th annual Workshop on Field Research Methods

Join us at the Stone Center for Latin American Studies for the 11th Annual Weekend Workshop on Field Research Methods on Saturday, January 26, 2019. The deadline to apply for the workshop is January 15, 2019.

How will you get the data you need for your thesis or dissertation? Do you envision immersing yourself for months in the local culture, or tromping the hills and farms seeking respondents? Sorting through dusty archives? Observing musicians at work in the plaza? Downloading and crunching numbers on a computer? For any of these approaches: How might you get there, from here?

This workshop aims to help you approach your data collection and analysis for your thesis or dissertation topic, and to adapt and refine your topic to be more feasible. You will take your research project ideas to the next stopwhatever that may be, include raising travel grants. Learn to:

Plan more efficiently, feasible, and rewarding fieldwork

Prepare more compelling and persuasive grant proposals

Navigate choices of research methods and course offerings on campus

Become a better research and fieldwork team-member

Format
This is an engaged, hands-on, informal workshop. Everyone shares ideas and participates. We will explore and compare research approaches, share experiences and brainstorm alternatives. You will be encouraged to think differently about your topic, questions, and study sites as well as language preparation, budgets, and logistics. The participatory format is intended to spark constructive new thinking, strategies, and student networks to continue learning about (and conducting) field research.

Who is leading this?Laura Murphy, PhD, faculty in Global Community Health and Behavioral Sciences, and affiliate faculty to the Stone Center for Latin American Studies.

Who is this for?
This workshop is targeted to Stone Center graduate students as well as graduate students from other programs (GOHB, CCC, humanities, sciences, and others) if space is available. The workshop will be particularly helpful for those who envision research with human subjects.

Sign up
Sign up as soon as you can! Apply by January 15, 2019, at the latest to confirm your stop. Send an email with the following details:

Your name

Department and Degree program

Year at Tulane

Prior experience in research, especially field research

Academic training in research design and methods

Include a 1-paragraph statement of your current research interests and immediate plans/needs (i.e. organize summer field research)

The symposium is looking for research that explores creative approaches to agency, institutional organization, and cultural production and consumption within complex social systems. What are the current issues facing our communities, institutions, and cities? How can we be creative and inclusive in our approach? We are interested in how scholars frame these questions in regards to race, gender, sexuality, and class. This symposium invites scholars to present work from a variety of disciplines, perspectives, theoretical frameworks, and methodologies. As the academy continues to evolve, interdisciplinarity proves more and more a necessity. This symposium intends to create an interdisciplinary space that can bring together scholars, practitioners, students, and community members to engage across lines and extend current conversations around agency, resilience, and social justice across the globe.

The keynote speaker, Dr. Ernesto Martinez, is an Associate Professor in Ethnic Studies at the University of Oregon. In his keynote address Queer Arousals in Contexts of Racialized Harm, Dr. Martinez conducts an intersectional analysis of the ways that queer men of color negotiate epistemic injustice through the creation and consumption of film, literature, and art. His research interests include queer ethnic studies, women of color feminisms, US Latinx literature and culture, and literary theory. He is the author of On Making Sense: Queer Race Narratives of Intelligibility (Stanford UP, 2012) and The Truly Diverse Faculty: New Dialogues in American Higher Education. (Palgrave, 2014). Along with his academic achievements, Dr. Martinez also writes bilingual Latinx children’s books, produces films (La Sarentata, 2017), and serves as a board member for the Association for Jotería Arts, Activism, and Scholarship (AJAAS), a queer Latinx grassroots organization dedicated to producing art and analyzing culture and politics in the context of activism.

Conference submissions are open to graduate students, outstanding undergraduates, educators, and practitioners. The symposium is a forum to showcase original research, theory expansion, innovative analysis, practical applications, and case studies. We welcome unpublished journal articles, area exam sections, dissertation chapters, working papers, and other forms of research analysis. As the space is intended to be for workshopping and dialoguing, literature reviews will not be considered. Presentations will be organized either in panels or individually.

The opening reception will be held on December 7, 2018 from 6:00 PM through 9:00 PM.

The exhibition Diego and Frida, A Halfway Smile consists of personal photographs through which the wonderful world shared by Diego Rivera and Frida Kahlo is revealed. One of the most controversial couples in the history of art in Mexico, united for almost 25 years, their relationship is marked by an infinity of encounters and disagreements. This axis of love witnessed innumerable contacts, closeness, complicity and deep friendships with great personalities of the time. It is through the images captured by friends like Manuel Álvarez Bravo, Nicolas Murray and Edward Weston that different stages of the relationship, life, pain and death of Frida and Diego are presented.

In 2018 the Ministry of Foreign Affairs of Mexico established the Mexican Cultural Institute in New Orleans. The primary objective of the Mexican Cultural Institute is to promote the image of Mexico by supporting cultural expressions in its broadest and fullest sense, including multidisciplinary forms like visual arts, music, performing arts, film, literature and gastronomy. The mission of the Cultural Institutes is to be protagonists of the cultural scene in their different host cities.

16th Annual Tulane Maya Symposium: The Ancient Maya and Collapse

The Middle American Research Institute, in collaboration with Tulane’s Stone Center for Latin American Studies, New Orleans Museum of Art, and Mexican Consulate in New Orleans, is proud to announce the 16th Annual Tulane Maya Symposium beginning on Thursday, February 14, and concluding on Sunday, February 17, 2019. This year’s conference The Center Could Not Hold: The Ancient Maya and Collapse will explore recent developments in Maya studies as they relate to the broader topic of collapse. Speakers and workshops will address the issue of political decline over the span of ancient Maya prehistory. These researchers will help us address the collapse in a multi-disciplinary fashion and bring attention to recent research in the region.

Registration is now open! Register by Monday, January 14 for the early registration rate.

On Friday, February 15, at 6:00 PM, the keynote address will be given by Jeremy A. Sabloff, External Professor of the Santa Fe Institute and Christopher H. Browne Distinguished Professor of Anthropology, Emeritus, of the University of Pennsylvania. In his talk Is “Collapse” a Useful Term in Understanding Pre-Columbian Maya History?, Dr. Sabloff considers how the term “collapse” has, in recent years, become quite controversial, and argues that there is good reason to question the utility of this loaded word going forward. This keynote talk will focus on understandings of the late 8th and early 9th centuries CE cultural processes and environmental events in the Maya Lowlands that culminated in what has often been seen as a political collapse. Moreover, the talk will examine whether such understanding can help illuminate comparable trends at other times in Maya history and in other complex societies in general.

Since 2002, the Middle American Research Institute of Tulane University has hosted a weekend of talks and workshops dedicated to the study of the Maya civilization of Mexico and Central America. This yearly meeting has called upon scholars from a wide spectrum of specialties including archaeology, art history, cultural anthropology, epigraphy, history, and linguistics to elucidate the many facets of this fascinating Mesoamerican culture. In developing a broad approach to the subject matter, the conference aims to draw the interest of a wide ranging group of participants from the expert to the beginner.